This year too a violinist as Young Musician! Every year the Association of the Belgian Music Press awards a prize to a young promising musician. This year the 26-year-old violinist Maya Levy may receive the medal.
Maya Levy was born in 1997 and has a French father and a Belgian mother. She began studying violin at the age of 4 with Bernadette Jansen. She then continued her studies with Igor Tkatchouk. Since 2013, she has been perfecting herself with Boris Kuschnir in Vienna. She has also participated in various masterclasses with leading teachers, such as Augustin Dumay, Pavel Vernikov, Itamar Golan, Renaud Capuçon, Miriam Fried, Andrei Baranov, Sergey Khachatryan and Leonidas Kavakos.
She has already achieved prestigious prizes - such as the 1er prix des Médias Francophones Publics 2020, the title Artiste de l'année 2022 from RTBF, a silver medal at the Manhattan International Music Competition and the Supernova prize from the Klara Festival. Maya Levy is also laureate of various important competitions, such as the Karol Szymanowski competition (2018) or the Karol Lipinski competition (2019). In 2021, she performed during the farewell concert in honour of German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Brussels Palace of Fine Arts.
She has performed with numerous renowned conductors and orchestras, such as the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre royal de chambre de Wallonie, the Torun Symphony Orchestra, the Mitteldeutsche Kammerphilharmonie and in halls such as the Konzerthaus in Berlin, the NOSPR concert hall in Poland, the Szczecin Philharmonic, Flagey, De Munt or BOZAR in Brussels, De Bijloke in Ghent, the Salle Philharmonique in Liège, the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow or the Recanati Concert Hall in Tel Aviv.
Maya is regularly invited to festivals: Les Sommets Musicaux in Gstaad (Switzerland), the Festival Mozartiana in Gdansk (Poland), the Festival de l'Eté mosan, the Klara Festival or the Festival Musiq'3 (Belgium), where she performs with artists such as Rolando Villazon, Julien Quentin, Boris Kusnezow, Alexander Mogilevsky, Marius Smolij, Rune Bergmann, Andrei Gridchuk and Omar Massa. The next season begins with a tour in China, followed by performances in Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Israel, France and Belgium.
Maya is a passionate chamber musician, formed a duo with pianist Matthieu Idmtal for seven years and was a member of the Carlo Van Neste Trio for ten years. Two CDs released by Pavane commemorate these partnerships: the complete piano trios of Mendelssohn (2014) and the three sonatas for violin and piano by Edvard Grieg with pianist Matthieu Idmtal (2017). This latter recording was very warmly received by the monthly magazine Classica and Strad Magazine, and made it into the Klara top 10. In 2021 she recorded a CD with violinist Hrachya Avanesyan entitled The Lockdown, featuring works for two violins by Piazzolla and Prokofiev (published by Rubicon Classics Ltd., London).
Maya plays a Guarneri (Cremona) from 1702.